GSoC 2019 [Collect build statistics]

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Arjun,

On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 at 10:35, Arjun Salyan via macports-dev wrote:
>
> Hi,
> I am working on the design of tables for installation statistics. I have a doubt here:
>
> Suppose there is a port P. Now for number of installations of P, there are many definitions I am having in my mind:
>
> Number of users currently having P in active_ports/ inactive_ports. [ACTIVE INSTALLATIONS]

Btw: I would ignore inactive ports (= count them as not installed).

> Number of users for which P ever appeared in active/ inactive ports, no matter if it is there at this point of time or not. [TOTAL INSTALLATIONS- counted only once per user]
> If any particular user installs P two times, then count that as two different installations. [TOTAL INSTALLATIONS]

I would use the first definition: number of users currently having the
port installed. It might be pretty common to have to reinstall the
same port multiple times (maybe just for debugging / development
reasons) and we don't want to count the port developer 20 times. If
the user uninstalled the port, it's equivalent to me as never having
it installed in the first place.

This reminds me on the old times with webpage view counters when one
could click "reload" twenty times and the page view counter would
simply keep increasing for each reload or any subpage visited.

There is one further caveat. The existing code of mpstat is only
executed once every two weeks. If you really wanted to count each
installation, you would need to modify port command (base code) to
report every single command to the server. We might eventually do
something like that to report broken builds etc., but that's currently
not ready.

Mojca